Heather Clark readily admits that she is no technophile.
“Absolutely not,” she says. “I laugh and say I’m surprised by how much I do know, but I barely know anything. I am not the expert.”
Even so, her husband, top-shelf techie Nick Clark, says that without her, his Chattanooga-based business, Fortech, might be no more than an idea.
“She had far more confidence in me than I had in myself” when it came to launching Fortech, he says. “She doesn’t have a ton of (tech) experience, but I absolutely credit her with getting it over the first few humps.”
The Clarks would seem to have done a great deal more than merely get over a few humps. Nick says the business posted sales of $1.1 million in 2024 and more than double that, $2.4 million, last year. Fortech, he says, deals in “smart-home” technology including audio/visual applications in entertainment and security/surveillance.
“Lots of people have separate, independent systems,” he says. “Smart home is what makes them all talk to each other.”
Nick, 41, says that he’d decided to launch Fortech by the time he and Heather married on New Year’s Eve 2019. He had spent nearly 20 years working in the field, with good success, before venturing out on his own.
He recalls that his first job after graduating from Ooltewah High School was an $8-per-hour gig that he thought involved installing central vacuums, but saw right away that it was really a smart-home company.
“Not smart in the way we mean today,” he says. “There were keypads for everything, centralized control, but it was an industry I didn’t even know existed.
“Before I worked the first day, I knew it was what I wanted to do forever.”
Two decades’ worth of experience later, he launched Fortech at about the same time Heather was embarking on a career in real estate. Nick says that while his wife spends most of her time on her work, the time she gives to Fortech is invaluable.
“She’s the one who makes sure we’re above board” when it comes to back-office functions, he says. “Reconciliation, taxes, licensing, insurance … the finance side is not my thing.
“And she’s much more outgoing, so when we do events, she’s great working it from the networking side.”
Nick says Heather, a Realtor for Coldwell Bank Pryor Realty, handled Fortech’s leasing of its Market Street showroom and its recent purchase of a downtown Chattanooga building that is now its warehouse and office space.
“I’d always been looking for a building (to buy), because I didn’t want to waste money on rent,” he says. “We bought a dump, but gutted and rebuilt it. It looks good now, and where we were bursting at the seams before (in an East Brainerd building), we’ve got some room to grow.”
With AI and robotics becoming ubiquitous, Nick takes a philosophical approach to the company’s growth.
“Our industry is always on the brink of going out of business,” he says. “‘Alexa’ was going to be the death of the smart home, but get it to work consistently and maybe I’ll buy a little of that. The death of video distribution was HDMI, but no – you just made it harder, which makes me more necessary.
“One door shuts and another opens,” he adds. “As things get retired or become obsolete, and a new thing comes along to solve the problem — who’s installing that new thing? People say robots are going to take your job – well, somebody’s got to build the robot.”
